Singapore

Singapore demolishes more than it preserves — this is a city that has rebuilt itself into a hyper-modern city-state within two generations, and most of its colonial-era architecture has long since given way to glass towers. Which is exactly what makes the handful of buildings that survived so valuable, and why one of them, in particular, still functions as a working hotel rather than a museum piece.

Raffles Hotel opened in 1887, named for the British colonial administrator who founded modern Singapore, and it has spent the years since as the default stage for anyone of consequence passing through the Straits of Malacca — traders, novelists, spies, exiled royalty, and eventually tourists. Its whitewashed colonial facade and palm-lined courtyard are one of the few fixed points in a skyline that otherwise reinvents itself every decade.

Singapore rewards visitors who understand that its history is compressed rather than absent. The Civic District around the Padang, the godowns of Boat Quay, and the shophouses of Chinatown all sit within walking distance of the hotel corridor, telling the story of a port city that went from fishing village to British entrepôt to independent global financial center in under two hundred years.